Noise and Signal
by Fixomnia Scribble
Summary: It's 2004. The alien race from Vega makes contact again, and this time they want to visit, and to help the Earth fight the colonization of the virus-born aliens. But what is their true intention? What is the Divine or Demonic nature of the Spaceship that everybody wants, and to whom does it rightfully belong? Is the Earth just a chessboard, or does Humanity have a greater role?
1. Bambi's Mother

**Summary** : It's 2004. The alien race from Vega makes contact again, and this time they want to visit, and to help the Earth fight the colonization of the virus-born aliens. But what is their true intention? What is the Divine or Demonic nature of the Spaceship that everybody wants, and to whom does it rightfully belong? Is the Earth just a chessboard, or does Humanity have a greater role to play? Starring a cast of characters from the X-Files, Carl Sagan's "Contact", and the "Wrinkle in Time" universe created by the incomparable Madeleine L'Engle. Notes:

 **Notes** : This was first published in February 2002, under an old, old pseudo. I thought I'd join this month's X-fic party and re-release, as many old X-Philes seem to be leaping out the woodwork! (Hello, hello, everyone!) So, with a few minor edits, here is 'Noise and Signal' again, polished and restored to its former...something. To be continued? Possibly. I know it's the most infuriating thing for a fic author to say, but I really don't know!

 **Disclaimer** : Oh, gods above and below, are we still doing these? All right. I disclaim, disavow and deny any ownership of these characters, and do not intend any infringement or material gain from the publication of this thing. This is a work of homage to the creators and actors involved in that sweeping modern epic known as "The X-Files", and the marvellous universes created by Carl Sagan and Madeleine L'Engle, respectively, in "Contact" and the "Wrinkle in Time" series.

* * *

Denver, Colorado  
January 2004  
DaCosta's Inn  
Poncha Springs

7:00 a.m.

"Bambi's mother died," Mulder says, in a voice not yet woken.

Scully looks up and ties the knot on her terry robe with more vigour than necessary.

Mulder's bespectacled eyes are blearily fixed on the Denver Post, spread out on the sparkly gold-and-white Formica of the drop-leaf table. The morning sunlight through the little yellow-curtained kitchenette window casts him in a nimbus, blinding her as it caroms off the table, but Scully knows he isn't smiling.

"Bambi of the roaches?" she asks finally, leaning against the matching sparkly countertop. "How?"

She can read the headlines of his newspaper upside-down from where she stands. With one pace she could be standing next to him. One step more, and she'd be tripping over the flowery, ruffly bed. At least the room is clean, assiduously so, with a tang of rose and eucalyptus potpourri that even bleach won't remove. It's sunk into the wallpaper after decades of permeation.

"Alzheimer's, it says. I didn't know she was such an entity in the science world. They gave her four inches and a nice picture. You can see the resemblance."

Tapping a finger on the paper, he throws back half of his coffee at once, and stands up quickly. He feels a sensation of fingers reaching out from dusty files, through all these years, to touch them in this most unlikely of locations. He feels the sympathy of one motherless adult for another, and remembers the strange dreamlike inevitability of the night he met Bambi, drawn like a moth despite himself.

It's a smile, anyway, and that's worth a great deal just now.

He leans on the table and looks out the window, sees great dark pine trees heavy with snow huddling together around the edges of the gravel parking lot. They're starting to steam a little as the sun comes around. A backlit electric sign that advertises, "Da Costa's Motor Inn – Truckers Welcome, Weekly Rates" spins precariously with a creaking protest song straight from the decade in which it was installed.

A few of their overnight guests are making an early start, their rigs warming up and grumbling like dragons.

Their clientele, who are the only people they speak with now, generally stop for the shortest mandatory rest duration before leaving at first light. There used to be a breakfast diner in the portable building next to the office, but it's closed now. Their most recent alter-egos, Mr. and Mrs. Hale, who have recently taken over the motel, have not decided how long they will stay, and hiring restaurant staff would mean that their lives would become common knowledge in the community.

But the drivers don't care. A comfortable, clean bed, a chance to phone home, and free, strong coffee in the lobby is all they ask for. One of the drivers spots Mulder standing in the window of the Caretaker's cottage, and waves, a friendly bulldog wrapped in flannel and denim. Mulder waves back, once, and the driver catches hold of his steering wheel and swings up into his cab, moving into gear and out of their lives.

Mulder watches him ease his way down the driveway, and sees the shimmer of hard frost on the truck's sides. And afterwards, a waver of an outline moving across the gravel road, like an afterimage of a human, that sends a nauseating pyloric tremor through him.

 _Great._

 _Get out of my head. Not now._

 _I need to get out of my head._

As he turns away to get dressed for his morning run, Scully pretends she isn't watching him, or checking out the protruding knobs of his backbone. She makes a show of reading the Berenbaum obituary. She smiles at the memory of her own adolescent posturing when she first met Berenbaum's daughter, and the frisson that arced between herself and Mulder as they stood watching her walk away. She'd give a lot for a moment of high absurdity these days.

Mulder begins jogging before he is even out the door. It clicks behind him.

She lets out her breath slowly. Sets her half-drunk coffee cup in the sink beside his, and pulls her thick robe more tightly around her.

The temperature has been dropping steadily every week. It's down to zero Fahrenheit this morning. Next winter, if they are still alive, they should head somewhere south, she thinks. When they first began running they had been so preoccupied with staying alive, or staying sane, that they didn't even think of winter.

* * *

It was due to Krycek's intervention, and Mulder's decision to trust him just this once, that they had found Da Costa's Inn, a small wayside truck-stop that required a caretaking couple, and provided accommodation and an adequate salary.

"You're gonna die of pneumonia if you keep sleeping in that damn van all winter, which is a shame, really, because I wanted to see your face when you found out I was right all along." Krycek had told Mulder.

Scully had glanced up at Mulder as he sat across from her in the diner, somewhere in Roanoke. He was glaring at something beside her. All the nerves in her flesh had rapid-fired in repulsion, the skin of her arms and back horripillating, and she'd drawn back into the corner as far as she could, away from what only Mulder could see.

She knew who it was. There was only one of them who seemed to appear in public, who enjoyed watching them chew on his words, unable to talk back to him without appearing nuts.

"And your girlfriend won't be in any condition to doctor you, either," he had continued, glancing at Scully with something like pity.

Neither Mulder nor Scully believed that death made all men noble, especially when they had changed sides more often during their life than a laundered dollar. Regardless, sleeping in the van had begun to take its toll. She had a troubling rattle in her chest when she woke up, and Mulder, when he slept, thrashed in the grip of night-terrors he hadn't experienced since he first became an only child.

In the week between Krycek's pointed suggestion, and their new roles as Mr. and Mrs. Hale, that pleasant new Canadian couple in town, Mulder had been almost silent.

He stared out the car window, and picked at his food when they stopped. He no longer badgered her about her little feet but let her drive on and on, until at last she would pull over, road-buzzed and thirsty, feeling as though the highway was slipping out from under her, a living, riverlike thing, purring and stretching as she furrowed in its silver coat with her wheels.

Krycek's spotted history notwithstanding, it was time to rest.

* * *

DaCosta's Inn had been home and employment for three months now. The pause in their nomadic life had been a relief at first. There had been moments of peacefulness and even lightness. They had even held a small Christmas Dinner for a few rig drivers who were stuck on the road away from their families, or who were trading the loneliness of an empty apartment for a fat Stat Holiday paycheque.

Scully had not sought out a Midnight Mass nearby, as she usually did, and Mulder had not mentioned it.

They hadn't realized how desperately they needed to rest. After spending a year on the road, hiding and healing, they had finally begun to find their rhythm again, their counterpoint harmony and natural syncopation. They felt once again the pioneer rush of entering unmarked land, of being the only two people alive who knew what they knew.

Not that they hadn't been helped. Many times.

Scully had never seen what Mulder finally admitted to seeing, but she knew the stamp of a Gunmen-inspired solution when she saw one. Credit cards. Phone cards. Mulder's ability to find friendly towns that asked no questions, or well-hidden camping spots, all without a map. The time for exposition and action had not yet come. The Gunmen kept them moving, and for good reason. A year was nothing to the men who planned their actions for generations in advance.

Besides the Gunmen and Krycek, they had only each other. Since everyone else they knew was either too well-liked or delicately placed to contact, they had taken turns dragging one another back from the gaping abyss of terror, futile rage, depression and bouts of suicidal homelust time after time, out of relentless, grinding necessity and fierce and stubborn love.

Other people could disappear, create new lives, enter Witness Protection, but not them. They were known, they were targeted, and for all they knew, the damned chip in Scully's neck was still reporting their every word and movement, her body programmed to go into auto-destruct again at its removal.

And yet they lived. Scully had started to believe she would see her son again, even hold him.

One night she gathered her courage, and whispered into the back of Mulder's shoulder her desire to be a family again, just the three of them, living somewhere within a walk of Maggie and Bill and Charles and their quickly growing families. Maybe a little girl next, for them to raise together in safety. _If one miracle, why not two?_

Mulder had hummed low in acknowledgement and reached back for her hand. At first she thought he was telling her to go to sleep, but then she felt a shudder and he pulled her hand up to press against his lips already slippery with tears. What else, after all, had he ever wanted, in his entire life, but the circle of a loving family, safe from harm? And to give her the same? And when had it ever been farther from his grasp?

She held him tighter. She didn't know what else to do.

The Gunmen had been busy this month. Several times, Scully had opened her wallet to pay a waitress or shopkeeper, and had found a photograph among the bills. The first time it happened, Mulder had had the blind luck to be watching her fingers, as he sometimes did. When he saw the edge of the thick paper and the bright red of Osh Kosh overalls, his hand went for hers like a snake and held it tight, but could not forestall her brittle cry.

She cussed at him like the Navy brat she was, when he wouldn't let her look at the photo but made her wait until they were slightly safer at full speed along the highway. Her wracking sobs and subsequent all-night silence validated his concern, and did nothing to quell his own reaction. Their son was growing up to look like an equal composite of them. He felt like he'd been kicked in the gut, and proud as hell all at once.

They have six photos now, received in six different states, all carefully cropped to wallet size. William pottering around, dragging a wooden duck on wheels. William grinning his lopsided Muldergrin at someone. William serious and a little pissed off. William riding in a harness on his adoptive father's back, twisting around to watch the photographer. William sleeping in his first pair of real big-boy pyjamas, having kicked the covers off himself in sleep and sprawled his long limbs all over his bed. William staggering towards the photographer with his arms out, his squeal of delight almost audible.

Despite the hurt, they never look at the photographs in sadness. They pick the moments when they are strong, together, even angry – but they will never burn the images of the little boy into their minds as an object of despair. He is theirs, created by them, meant for them, and they for him.

* * *

In the tiny trailer, Scully shakes her head and gathers up her clothes on her way to the shower stall. Maybe it's time to re-think that policy. It's been a long time since they shared those photos, and she thinks that it might do them both a world of good right now.

 _Despair is their worst enemy_ , Mulder reminds her sometimes, sounding like a well-trained desert Fremen. When he utters these things, Scully thinks of Jesus' time in the desert, and wonders what he would do if she were not with him. He is altering before their eyes, adrift in a new land that has nothing to do with route maps and fuel prices. He's as deep as a moon crater and as likely as not to counter his own resonant truths with a self-deprecating retort, as if assuring her of his fallible humanity. She wishes he wouldn't. The truth of him is what relentlessly carved at the walls of her heart like a sea-cave.

She sees in his eyes a reflection of the awe she feels for him at those times, when she picks herself up again after what she politely calls _a bad night_ , and says to him, _let's keep going_.

At night he strips down mechanically, in front of her searching gaze and aching heart, and unravels just enough to gather her close, curling her into his lightly furzed chest like a great warm bear, his breath rough in her hair, whispering sorry _I'm sorry Dana I'm so sorry it's not you it's not you._ She knows. He is an unwitting radio, tuned to some frequency she cannot access. His energy is being transmuted. And she has to admit she is relived. She can't even think of sex without thinking of William, and anyway, she has a profound feeling that she no longer knows him as a lover, not this changed Mulder. It serves them both to simply hold each other through the long sleepless nights.

"Can you tell me what they tell you?" she asked him last week, low pillow murmurs for the pleasure of the sound, and he shook his head.

"It's all broken-up now, since we stopped. It's just sounds that seem like language now and then. Overlayered, like being stuck between stations. But we're not supposed to move yet. I think something's shifting around in their world, or maybe in ours, but they haven't figured out how to work with it."

"Can you, I don't know, fine-tune?"

"Being haunted isn't the same as being sensitive, or even superperceptive, Scully. You know that. You're the sensitive one. This is different. They come to me and find a way in when and how they choose."

She sighs, knowing a little of what he's done in the past to numb himself to the visions and voices, and wonders what else there was she didn't know about during his absence.

"Do you think," she asked carefully, sidestepping the mousetrap he'd set for her, "that you've developed, or have realized, medium-like qualities? That you can suspend your own consciousness and let others enter, or enter into others yourself?"

The state of Mulder's consciousness was a thing they discussed as if they were the parents of a child with some undiagnosed condition, fear giving way to love and acceptance in a neverending cycle of resolution and pain and impossible questions. There was no way to know the extent of the damage wrought upon his fine mind, through impromptu brain surgery, or Fowley's drugs, or the undiagnosed lesions he might still be carrying. Or perhaps it was the normal human aftereffects of extreme mental and physical trauma. Or maybe he was evolving beyond documented human progress and they had only the phenomenal evidence of eyes and hearts to guide them.

Most times, he went along gamely, behaving as a self-aware guinea pig. Sometimes not.

"Do you know," he had replied, "that you're speaking in redundancies, as though the lack of specific terms can somehow be remedied by overabundance?"

"Well." She had closed her eyes and burrowed more tightly into his chest, "I'm trained to think in scientific terms. You're the one with the humanities background."

"I wasn't criticizing." Then, after a pause, "Deflecting, sure."

"I didn't take it as such. Not from you."

* * *

After the past year of infrequent, exhausted motel stops to sleep indoors, wash their clothes and switch the registration plates on the van again, they are making up for lost time. Long, wordy explorations of shared experience and individual reality. Transcending the conversation itself to agree upon terms and meanings and to examine their own discussion patterns. Often naked and neatly paralleled on whatever bed they had, not touching except for their linked fingers as communication aids.

She found herself observing them as from above, one rainy night in November, but when she opened her mouth to tell him, she found herself shaking in his arms, needing instead to touch his solidity, to be held and anchored within the reality she was used to. She told herself it was a symptom of high anxiety, to have bodily dissociations.

Except she hadn't been anxious, and she wasn't dissociative.

She realized then that if that small subversion of perception caused such anxiety in her, that Mulder must either be suffering deeply and silently, was mentally looser in the hinges than she, or was truly extraordinary in his ability to accept the radically altered scape of his experience.

She has come to suspect that he has more changes to undergo, and perhaps has been in a chrysalis-state lately, rather than depressed. His sleep is unnaturally deep and his energy sporadic, his movements jerky as a teenager, and his eyes always in the middle distance.

A wave of painful love sweeps her, and she swallows hard. Once again she commits herself firmly to remaining beside this strange and fugitive man, her best friend and erstwhile lover, her spirit-mate, co-parent and husband in all but signature.

Some questions she doesn't ask. Does Krycek have one arm or two now? Are the Gunmen any less paranoid, and did they find out who really killed JFK, and why?

 _Whatever happened to Skinner?_

 _Does Emily ever come to him, or is she all hers?_

 _Would he tell her if he saw William?_


	2. Making Contact

October 2004  
Arecibo, Puerto Rico

Days after their arrival, when she had finally begun to sleep until dawn instead of waking in the dark, to shake Mulder's shoulder as he slept in the passenger seat, and ease them back onto the quiet highway, she would remember the raucous calling of the birds. Didn't all wild things fall silent when humans passed by, especially those who rumbled through their territory in large vehicles?

The birds of the Cambalache Forest Reserve in Arecibo, however, were clamoring in the tree canopy above. Numbed by the long months of white noise and the constant vibration of the car, Scully noticed only the stillness of the earth under her sneakers, and then the sudden weightlessness of breathing in open space.

She had become nearly agoraphobic, she realized, her nape prickling with imagined crosshairs. She stood with her back against the familiar body of the car, palms sticky on the hot door, and looked around.

Mulder swung himself out from the driver's seat, stretched up and twisted his spine from side to side. She felt a pang as he grinned lopsidedly at her over the roof, his eyes sweeping over the scene. They might have been starting another case that set their blood fizzing and their minds racing, instead of being on the four hundred and sixty-seventh day of their death.

She took a deep breath, and managed a quick readjustment of her grubby brown ponytail. She wished there had been time for a shower, but at least she'd changed into her last clean t-shirt. Her khaki jeans hid most of the dirt but looked as though she'd slept in them-which she had. She'd have to meet these people as she was and hope for the best.

While Mulder was looking away, she fished her wallet out of her polar fleece jacket, opened it to her only remaining photo of William, and touched his plump little cheek with her finger. She inhaled again, very slowly.

"And here I thought T-birds were for hunting chicks, not aliens." Mulder said, jarring her from her thoughts as he ran a finger over a shiny chrome tailfin next to them. The tailfin belonged to a 1957 convertible coupe in buttercream with brown leather seats, in immaculate condition.

"We only use it for hunting alien chicks now," a pleasantly rolling Tennessee voice replied, "Dana? Fox? I'm glad you made good time."

"Reverend Dr. Joss?" Scully asked, starting down the white gravel path that wound towards the small stucco cottage. Joss stood leaning against the cottage door, tall and lanky in a cream cable-knit sweater and blue jeans. His face was grave but his eyes were deeply lit beneath rumpled hair.

"Please, just Palmer." He took her hand in both of his. "You're welcome here."

He turned to Mulder-they were of a height, Scully noticed, as they shook hands, and with the same slight inward curve as each tried to downplay their size and strength. She lowered her eyes and smiled. Boys, boys...

* * *

Palmer led them into the house, and handed Scully's jacket from her drooping shoulders and into the closet with such preoccupied grace that even Mulder couldn't rouse a spark of protectiveness. The man was simply etheric, he thought. The warmth was genuine. Given Palmer's career and reputation as a top-level dialogue-maker, he wondered why that surprised him.

Shelving that thought as Palmer began to lead them through the house, he enjoyed the irony of the Consortium's most wanted couple ending up as honoured guests in a house with 24-hour NSA and Secret Service protection. At the very least. Who knew how many interests were watching over Drs. Joss and Arroway, domestic, foreign or alien?

He and Scully hadn't needed to discuss the gravity of the risk they were taking. People changed sides, interests gained and lost power. They had to assume they had been tracked to Joss and Arroway's Arecibo winter residence, and if their hosts' protective umbrella became compromised, they were all dead. They might as well have gone on a year-long pleasure cruise together in the public eye.

But Byers had been his usual self as he told Mulder how to contact the couple.

"There may be other ways," he had said, "But this is a good window of opportunity. You've been discredited enough in DC, and you've been dead long enough to be remembered in song. Dr. Arroway and Dr. Joss are wintering in Radioville, and the President tries to leave them to their research while they're on retreat. Besides, you're in no shape to keep moving through another winter. It's a good time to start making connections again. For now, they are the safest channel."

And he told Mulder the outside access code for Ellie and Palmer's privately-operated secure STE communications relay, which only the White House and hand-picked members of their circles knew. The dynamic polyencryption service was not cheap, which was yet another detractor for its users. Privacy, even more than security, was an expensive commodity.

"Thanks to you, cheap isn't an issue." Mulder thought at him, amused at the rarefied access-level into which he had been placed, "Listen, do you do hauntings on request?"

Byers smiled and brushed imaginary lint off his tie. "Get over this death obsession, Mulder. I'm not at all dead and I'm not in denial. I promise I'll show you sometime."

And Ellie, in response to Mulder's communique, had promised them anything in her power to provide, in a hastily-scribbled fax which reached them at Da Costa's Inn, which was no longer their home since it had burned to the ground six months previously.

They had been running ever since. They were tired. Nothing had changed in a year of running, except that the four months in which they had played at being innkeepers had let them rest a little.

Until Byers had suggested one person who might help them. Two, in fact: Dr. Eleanor Arroway, a radio-astronomer of international renown, who was widely held by believers to be one of the first human beings to make direct contact with an alien race, and her friend Sheila Lasker.

That was, President of the United States Sheila Lasker, the first female POTUS, who was the most NASA-friendly President in history, and with good reason. NASA had morphed into a heavily funded public-private-military consortium over the past few years, and though no further alien contact had been definitively made, there was enough circumstantial evidence to keep the funds flowing.

So Mulder had used Byers' information and reached out to Ellie, assuring her that he had received the protocol and code from a mutual friend.

"Dear George," Ellie had written back, "Of course we would love to host you and your wife over the holidays. Please leave everything to us, and plan on staying as long as you can."

She had had it sent from a convenience-store fax machine in New York City, by some kid who had walked by her café table at the right time and was glad to accept a twenty. He even tried to come back with a receipt for her, but Ellie was already gone. She had trusted them to figure out how to get themselves to the house and not exposed any other information. Mulder liked her already.

And though he and Scully had bandied a hundred possibilities around, they had no earthly clue what Byers meant.

"Maybe it's what Miracle Max meant by 'all the way dead' and 'nearly dead'?" Scully suggested once.

* * *

Palmer was more concerned with his guests' emotional well-being than the surreal world of spies, players, cops and robbers they had fallen into. He hoped he could be of counsel to them. The world – no, not just the world, he corrected himself – the universe would need strong leadership, if a fraction of what he had heard was correct. But just now, Mulder was twitchy as hell and Dana looked as though she had bought into the myth of her own death. And wasn't there a child out there somewhere? Given up to be kept out of harms' way? Holy God.

He tried not to think of how simple it would have been for he and Ellie to foster the child, if they had known in time. What a blessing, to raise a little boy among the world's scientific and spiritual guardians and seekers - their close friends and colleagues. He assumed the boy was one of the world's messenger-children, and had a moment of inner prideful reckoning at the knowledge of the extraordinary life they could have provided him. Or any child at all.

Who would have been surprised, if they had fostered or adopted a family? What reaction but happiness and support would their friends have shown? Yet neither would give up on science or faith, and so the years had ticked mercilessly onwards, till menopause, a litany of thwarted medical procedures, and the pain of blindly accepting a greater purpose had ended the battle in a draw.

He wondered how the next days would play out, and on what levels they and their guests would connect. There was a lot of common ground between the four of them, but they were, after all, strangers a generation apart. Strangers who did not give their trust easily, and who bore the scars of painful experience.

Sending up a prayer for all of them, he guided them through the house towards Ellie and the living room.

* * *

The cottage seemed larger on the inside than the outside, being a long hallway with rooms opening off both sides, ending in a newly-modeled L-shaped living room and kitchen at the back. Hardwood floors gleamed from under narrow, hand-woven carpet runners, and the door handles were brass fittings sunk deep into solid wooden doors.

Beyond one open door was a large, freshly-made bed with a pair of wicker nighttables and a matching chair near the window. Scully wanted suddenly to crawl into that bed so badly that her legs went momentarily weak. To stretch out between crisp white sheets, under that thick quilt, after a hot bath...she forced herself to keep walking, and was not surprised to feel Mulder's fingers at her back, propping her up.

Last year on his birthday, she thought tiredly, they'd been in in southern California, anonymous and still flushed with the heady wine of survival despite all. There'd been a village festival of some sort, and they'd gone dancing, tipsy on sangria and calling each other Fred and Ethel. It might have been their honeymoon, after all, and nobody knew what they were talking about anyway. He'd lifted her against him and had danced her around and around till she was laughing and dizzy.

That night, in the little hotel room, he had run his big warm hand down her side as he lay behind her, and she had thought that maybe, just maybe she could do it now. She'd wanted to absolve and cleanse herself in his fierce loving, reopen the scars so that she could let out all the poison and heal cleanly. But she couldn't. He didn't flinch or roll away from her that night, or any night since, but simply gathered her close, and breathed in rhythm with her until she slept.

And here they were now, and there was gray in Mulder's beard and at her temples, though hers was hidden under mousy dye. Mulder still hadn't admitted that half his information-usually the most accurate-came from contacts who were long dead, though she knew the truth well enough. By now, William would be calling his adoptive parents Mommy and Daddy instead of them.

Yes, Scully thought, she wanted to sleep for hours and days and weeks. Another whole year, if possible. But even a full night would do.

"El," Palmer called out, as they entered the living-room space, "Dana and Fox."

Behind the central island, adding ice to a tall pitcher of tea was a medium-sized woman of indeterminate age, with medium-brown hair and eyes. After that, all mediocrity fled, for Dr. Arroway radiated a high-frequency crackling energy that escaped in her quick fingers and all-encompassing glance.

Scully inhaled and smiled her old polite conference greeting smile, and took a step towards Ellie with her hand outstretched.

Ellie recognized the look as a further variation on the usual "this woman has talked with aliens?" that she encountered with every new meeting, looked solemn though her eyes glinted cheerfully. She indicated her icy wet fingers and said bluntly, "The thing with having met with an alien race is that you realize just how contextual and arbitrary our greeting rituals are. Handshakes make little sense, when taken at face value."

Scully's smile remained still, and with God only knew what strength, she asked, "Well, what then? Do we recite our lineages, or an epic poem of our civilization's heroes?"

"I was thinking of a hug, actually," said Ellie, putting down her tea towel, "And your Fox looks like a limerick man if I ever saw one, so we'd better avoid poetry. Oh, come here, dear. What a time you've had."

And Scully, who had begun to giggle in slight hysteria, found herself being embraced by a woman of her mother's age, who moreover was also a fellow scientist who had spoken with extra-terrestrial beings and therefore probably wouldn't think she was crazy, and she began to shake with deep, silent sobs in Ellie's arms.


End file.
